Monday, January 14, 2013

Wacker Drive, on the right of the photo, running along the south side of the Chicago River, was formally
begun on January after a meeting at City Hall (JWB Photo)

“Full
speed ahead on the widening and double decking of South Water street at a cost
of $20,000,000, a project which it is contended will ultimately mean as much to
Chicago as the $16,000,00 boulevard link improvement has meant,” was what The
Chicago Tribune
offered as its lead story on this date in 1922.The day before Mayor “Big Bill” Thompson ordered that the plan,
initially presented to the public in 1917 by the Chicago Plan commission at an
official luncheon at the Hotel Sherman, be started.

Just a
few days ago I mentioned that in the first week of 1910 the Chicago Plan was
officially introduced at a gala event at the Congress Hotel.Find that discussion here.The massive transformation of South
Water Street from bedlam to the smooth and sleek double decks of
today’s Wacker Drive, the beginning of which was outlined in The Tribune article on this day in 1922, was a direct result of that Chicago Plan.

Wacker Drive and its slowly expanding riverwalk are today attractions that delight visitors to thecity as well as Chicagoans themselves. (JWB Photo)

Excitement
abounded and the city was raring to get started when the new plans were
approved in 1917.Charles H. Wacker, chairman of the Chicago Plan commission, reckoned
that when the plan was finished the new street would be “second only to
Michigan boulevard as a show place in Chicago and at the same time will reduce
the traffic complications of the city in the rush hours by at least 16 per
cent.”

The
report of the Plan commission gave three recommendations that would “change the
street into a fine highway of tremendous economic value in Chicago.”

First,
“To convert into street space all of the property between the river and South
Water street from State street to Market street (today's South Wacker Drive).”

Second,
“To double deck the street at the height of the bridges, using the upper level
for light and the lower for heavy traffic; connecting the Illinois Central
freight and the lake front warehouse and manufacturing districts with the west
side railway and industrial zone.”

Finally,
“To utilize the lower level for water and rail freight transfer and team track
facilities, made possible by river lighterage or as a public parking space for
automobiles.”

The
plans for the project were prepared by Edward H. Bennett, a principal
contributor to the original Plan of 1909 and the designer of the Michigan
Avenue bridge, finished in 1920.The transportation and traffic plans were assembled by Henry A.
Goetz.Both men worked under the
direction of Mr. Wacker and the project’s managing director, Walter D.
Moody.The plans were reviewed and
endorsed by John F. Wallace, chairman of the railway terminal commission and
the city’s engineers, John Ericson and C. D. Hill.

So
everyone was on board.A Tribune editorial on November 25, 1917 praised
the ambitious plan, saying that it would “not only be a long step forward in
the great work which the commission has mapped out for both the beautification
and material betterment of the city, but also as a concrete real estate
proposition it would be a boon to the entire north end of the downtown
district.”

Depiction of what the plan for the new drive might look like, asdepicted in the November 25, 1917 Chicago Tribune

That
editorial, though, contained a good portion of pessimism about the chances of
the project being completed in a timely fashion.The worth of the project, the paper wrote, “is tempered by
the well grounded belief that many years are likely to elapse before the
produce business takes its departure from that street, and that many more are
likely to pass before there is any possibility of a realization of such a fine
public work . . .”

In a
separate editorial on that same date the paper provided another cause for
pessimism – inaction on the part of those who governed the city.“We do not ask of a city government
even that it ‘set and think.’We
know it will merely ‘set.’We
would not recognize as a local administrative body anything which had a mental
process or a movement of physical activity.We recognize municipal authority is a spongelike substance
which gets into the city hall, swells out, and fills it.”

It
turned out that The Tribune had the situation pretty well analyzed.Finally, as 1922 began a delegation
called on Mayor Thompson. It was composed of Charles H. Wacker, the chairman of
the Plan commission; D. F. Kelly, general manager of Mandel Brothers; James
Simpson, vice-president of Marshall Field & Co.; Frank L. Bennett, former
commissioner of public parks; and former City Controller Walter Wilson.

At the
conclusion of the meeting Michael J. Faherty, president of the board of local
improvements, the body that had overseen the construction of the link bridge across
the river at Michigan Avenue two years earlier, announced that the assessment
request for the improvement would be filed in the County court within 30
days.Over 16 million dollars was
needed for the project in addition to th $3,800,000 that had been approved by
voters in November of 1919.

The
plan commission estimated that in one area alone, the waste of food caused by
long hauls through crowded streets, along with the cost of handling and
rehandling the produce, as well as the delays caused by the South Water
market’s chaos, $6,000,000 was lost every year.

South Water Street nears an end on August 27, 1925 (Google Image)

The
recent improvements to Michigan Avenue had blatantly pointed out what a mess
the archaic market of South Water Street was.We can’t imagine it today as we glide along the river on a
tour boat or zip through the rebuilt lower Wacker Drive from the lake to the
Eisenhower.But 90 years ago the area we know today as Illinois Center and Lakeshore East was a vast freight yard for
the Illinois Central, and South Water Street was a smelly, noisy collection of produce,
horse carts, trucks, and shouting vendors from Michigan Avenue all the way to
the Rush Street bridge that connected to the Chicago and Northwestern terminal north of the river.

As
Charles Wacker stated, “South Water street is a burdensome charge on the people
of Chicago.It an economic waste,
a drawback to progress, and obstruction to the city’s development, insanitary,
a cause of congestion, and a constant conflagration danger to the loop.”

Four
years after Wacker made that assessment, the double-deck, riverside highway
named after him was completed from Michigan Avenue to Lake Street, finished in
less time than the initial delay between its original approval in 1917 and the
start of the project in 1922. Can you imagine what the city on the river would look like without it?

Wabash Plaza, designed by Carol Ross Barney & Jankowski, with Harry Weese's Seventeenth Church of ChristScientist in the background -- one of the many places of interest along the Wacker Drive river walk (JWB Photo)